Already at their second beta release [German], Zebuntu is an Xfce-based Ubuntu distribution with heavy - you guessed it - Zeta influences. Bernd Korz explains the goals of Zebuntu in the project's announcement [German]: "Our goal is to use BlueEyedOS to offer a new platform for our former Zeta customers. In the future, Zeta, BeOS, as well as any future Haiku applications, will run natively on Zebuntu. This also offers a distinct advantage for developers for these platforms; they can use Zebuntu to develop for their platforms while utilising the performance and versatility of Linux." In other words, run BeOS applications on Linux. They have not forgotten about BFS support either. The project is, of course, completely open source. The website is only available in German for now, but Zebuntu developer Leszek Lesner confirmed to me that work is being done on an English variant (there already is an English development blog). Download the second beta from their download page, and, of course, see some screenshots.

Just yesterday I was playing around with Fedora and Unbuntu in VMWare Fusion and although Ubuntu worked well (I had problems with Fedora) they just didn't excite me. Same ol' Linux distro but apart from the free source I didn't see much to offer over OS X. I do a bit of media work, and I really appreciate the tight integration of everything in OS X (coming from the BeOS world this is no surprise).

Having downloaded Beta 2 (and waiting for Beta 3), I have to say this looks like a nice distro. I did have an issue with the deskbar and dock disappearing (permanently) so it's not quite there yet, but it seemed like a well-put together distribution so far.

What excites me about Zebuntu, though, is that you can have WINE installed, run Windows, Linux and hopefully BeOS apps pretty seamlessly. Don't forget that Bernd has access (not sure about the legality of it) for some video editing apps on Zeta and a few other programs that would be nice to have ported over to run on a Linux distribution.

All things being equal, it's nice to see someone trying something new with Linux instead of making it "just another distribution". Could be something different, which is sorely missing from computing these days.